Walter Benjamin died 68 years ago

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68 years ago, Walter Benjamin committed suicide attempting to escape from the Nazis: Benjamin failed to reach Portugal (officially a neutral country) through Spain, on his way to the United States. Apparently, he took his own life on September 27, 1940 at Portbou, a border town in the Pyrenees, swallowing an overdose of morphine compound, after the group of Jewish refugees he joined was intercepted by the Spanish Police. The other persons in his group of refugees were allowed passage the next day, and safely reached Lisbon on 30 September. One way of interpreting these facts is that though the entire group of travellers was stopped, Benjamin was in fact the main target. As an emigrant Jew, a radical writer who had made close friends with Brecht and Adorno, and a fierce critic of Nazism he would have been well-known to the Gestapo and it is a well documented fact that the Spanish border police were cooperative with the Germans.

There is a fair amount of speculation about Benjamins death, including the theory that he was murdered by Stalinist agents. Maybe you want to check out the film Who killed Walter Benjamin?

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German-Jewish Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. He was at times associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory and was also greatly inspired by the Marxism of Bertolt Brecht and Jewish mysticism as presented by Gershom Scholem.
As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which was a novel contribution to western philosophy, Marxism, and aesthetic theory. As a literary scholar, he translated Charles Baudelaire's "Tableaux Parisiens" and Marcel Proust's famous novel, "In Search of Lost Time". His work is widely cited in academic and literary studies, in particular his essays "The Task of the Translator" and "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility".

In 1921 He published "Critique of Violence" (Kritik der Gewalt), you will find a pdf of this text via this link:

Walter Benjamin - Critique Of Violence (pdf) (english)

If you want to go deeper, here´s an comprehensive introduction to the thought of Walter Benjamin: "The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin" by David S. Ferris (pdf, english) examines different significant aspects of Benjamin's work. Topics of contributions include Benjamin's relationship to the avant-garde movements of his time; his theories on language, mimesis and modernity; and his relevance to modern cultural studies. Additional material includes autobiographical writings, a guide to further reading and a chronology.